It is well known in the art that the United States and other post offices in the world use a technique of attaching a “return receipt requested form” to letters for which verification of delivery is desired. A handwritten signature is used to guarantee that the document has been delivered to the specified party. A problem with this approach is in verifying that the person signing for the document is authorized to receive the document. Usually the post office must rely on the assumption that anyone at the address specified on the document is authorized to receive the document. The person who originally sent the document may have no mechanism to verify that the document actually was given to the authorized recipient.
Commercial package delivery services have slight extensions to the above “return receipt” mechanism, the extensions including automated scanning of the recipient's signature to make the signature viewable by way of the internet. This improves the turn around time for receiving the “receipt” but still does not assure that the document was received by the authorized party.
Therefore, there is a need for ways which assure that the contents of a document are only received by the person who is authorized to receive the document.